The Democratic primary, part 2

This is profoundly annoying — there’s exit poll data for only five states below the line, one of which is Sanders’s home state and one of which is an unexplained outlier. How is anyone supposed to run any statistical analysis with this garbage? CBS and NYT are no better.

Is there a way to estimate white % for Sanders in states without exit polling? I don’t know statistics.

Perhaps there are regional effects beyond our mystery coefficient. Looking at states with substantial Southern Baptist populations alone (that is: Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma), r = -0.5729, p = 0.051. This is not significant at p < 0.05, but only barely. If we add Maryland, which was founded as a refuge for Catholics and is plurality Catholic today, to make this a measure of the whole South, we get r = -0.562, p = 0.046.

Before looking at the non-Southern states, remember that we’re missing most of the low end. Pearson’s coefficient is woefully unsuited to this. Southern states don’t have this problem: all but Louisiana have exit poll data, and all but Kentucky (and West Virginia, which would be included by the Southern Baptist metric, and Delaware, which wouldn’t be) have voted. It’s pointless to give Pearson’s coefficient here; I include it in the hope that it motivates someone who does statistics to do a better analysis, or at least find more exit poll data. Non-Southern states: r = -0.5124, p = 0.061. Non-Southern states minus Texas, Nevada, and Vermont, r = -0.1683, p = 0.62.